Ball Lightning

I passed him half a bottle of Red Star erguotou. He held it over the candle flame to warm it, but he soon grew impatient and tossed back a few mouthfuls. Wiping his mouth, he said, “No beating around the bush. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

Ambush at Sea

This is the account that Ding Yi gave me of what happened at the ball lightning research base after I left:

Because the nuclear plant operation was such a big success (from the military’s point of view, at least), the sidelined ball lightning weapons project began to receive renewed interest, followed by substantial investment. This investment was mostly put toward collecting chip-striking macro-electrons, as highly selective strikes on integrated circuits were believed to be the area of ball lightning weapons with the greatest potential. After a large amount of work, there were finally more than five thousand of these rare macro-electrons in storage, enough to constitute a combat-capable weapons system.

When war broke out, the base entered a state of nervous excitement. Practically everyone there believed that ball lightning would be to this war what the tank was to the First World War and the atom bomb to the Second, a history-making weapon. Overflowing with enthusiasm, they prepared to make history, but their instructions from the higher-ups were just two words: await orders

. And thus Dawnlight was the idlest of all the units in the war. At first, people imagined that High Command might want to use the weapon in the most critical position at the most critical moment, but Lin Yun learned through her channels that they were thinking too highly of themselves; High Command had a fairly low opinion of the weapon. They believed that the nuclear plant operation had been a special case and did not prove the weapon system’s battlefield potential. None of the branches had much of an interest in putting the weapon to use. Hence, investment in the project dried up again.

After the destruction of the Zhufeng carrier battle group, the base was fraught with anxiety. The staff were baffled that the demonstration of the enormous power of a different new-concept weapon had done nothing to shake up old attitudes toward ball lightning. They felt that their weapon was the only hope left for turning the tide of the war.

Lin Yun repeatedly asked her father to give Dawnlight a battle assignment, but each time she was refused. On one occasion, General Lin told his daughter, “Xiao Yun, don’t let your fascination with weapons develop into superstition. Your thinking about war needs to be deeper, more holistic. The notion that the entire war can be won by relying on one or two new-concept weapons is, frankly, naïve.”

* * *

Here Ding Yi said, “As a believer in science, my faith in the weapons was even stronger than Lin Yun’s. I firmly believed that ball lightning could determine the outcome of the war. At the time, I ascribed High Command’s attitude toward ball lightning weapons to rigid thinking that was impervious to reason, and I was far more annoyed than most of the people at the base. But the way things developed ultimately demonstrated our naïveté.”

* * *

At last there was a turning point. The base and Dawnlight received orders to carry out an exploratory attack on an enemy carrier group in coastal waters.

The headquarters of the South Sea Fleet convened a war meeting. Personnel in attendance were not of high rank, so clearly the higher-ups did not place much value on this combat operation. Two senior colonels chaired the meeting: one the director of the fleet’s Operations Division, the other from the army, the second commander of the Southern Military Region’s coastal defense system. The other twenty-odd officers mostly hailed from submarine units and the coastal force of the South Sea Fleet.